“Banking while Black” is still a major problem in the U.S., as evidenced by a new class-action lawsuit brought by a customer of Wells Fargo against the bank for discrimination.

Businessman Ernst Valery, a local Baltimore developer, has been a bank customer for more than over 20 years in good standing with multiple accounts under his name. So when he came to his branch to deposit a $3 million check, he didn’t think it would be an issue. 

In his lawsuit, Valery said he and his wife, Dana, visited a Wells Fargo bank in Baltimore on Oct. 9, 2020. Valery had a check from the State of Maryland made out to Mr. and Mrs. Valery for $3 million, which they wanted to deposit in their joint account. 

The $3 million was a payment in connection with a historic tax credit that had been awarded by the State of Maryland for a development project Valery had spearheaded to turn an abandoned Baltimore church into a brewery and affordable housing. The project has even been featured by local press, such as the Baltimore Sun.

While Valery was trying to deposit the check, a bank manager came out and began interrogating him, court papers said. 

“Even after Mr. Valery calmly and professionally attempted to explain the source of the check and the nature of the tax credit involved (none of which he was required to divulge to the banker but which he did in order to placate the situation and facilitate the transaction), the Wells Fargo manager continued to refuse Mr. Valery’s request to deposit the funds in the joint account,” said Valery’s’s attorney, Elizabeth Lee Beck of Beck and Lee Trial Lawyers of Miami, according to Black Star News. 

The Valerys eventually left without depositing the check.

Valery, who immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti when he was 8 years old, is managing partner of SAA EVI Development, a prominent real estate developer in Baltimore that focuses on low-income and underserved minority communities. 

The lawsuit, filed on Dec. 14 in the U.S. District Court for the North District of California in San Francisco, calls on other Black Wells Fargo customers to join the suit and seeks to stop the bank from operating in a discriminatory manner, Business Journal reported. Wells Fargo is headquartered in San Francisco.

“Mr. Valery’s experience is just one more in a striking series of shameful ‘banking while Black’ incidents that have occurred at Wells Fargo branches in recent years, which constitute overwhelming evidence of systematic racism emanating from this banking institution,” Beck said.

There have been other incidents of discrimination committed by Wells Fargo, Beck said, citing a June 2020 New York Times article. The article describes four recent examples of “banking while Black,” three of which occurred at Wells Fargo bank branches. In December 2018, Claire Middleton, for example, attempted to cash a $200 check at a Wells Fargo branch in Atlanta. Bank employees accused her of fraud and called the police. In March 2019, Jabari Bennett tried to withdraw $6,400 from his Wells Fargo account containing approximately $70,000 so he could buy a used car. The Wilmington, Delaware, branch refused to accept that he was the account holder and threatened to call the police when he persisted in trying to complete the transaction. And in April 2019, the manager of a Tampa, Florida-area Wells Fargo branch called attorney Benndrick Watson the “N-word” while he was trying to open a business account for his law firm.

The lawsuit also wants the court to order Wells Fargo to implement “whatever measures are necessary to remedy” the alleged violations as well as inform each Wells Fargo Black banking customer of opportunities to get damages or restitution.

“The problem is you’ve got the Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement, and now you’ve got (President-Elect Joe) Biden coming into office and hopefully we’re not going to treat immigrants as horribly, but are we really trying to change anything?” Valery asked the Business Journal. “These institutions are racist. I feel like I’ve worked my butt off and gone to good schools and I could walk into a bank that I’ve had for 27 years-plus and that history is out the door because of the color of my skin.

“Their processes are the reason people are being left behind and disrespected. At the end of the day, it’s like, what do we do? These people exist in our financial institutions and nothing is being done about it. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist anymore. At the end of the day someone has got to be held accountable.”

Bank spokesman Del Galloway told the Business Journal that the bank is “aware of the allegations.” The bank later provided a statement saying it followed “established procedures for accepting high-dollar checks for deposit.”

“While we cannot comment on the specifics of Mr. Valery and his customer experience, we did follow appropriate procedures for his deposit,” Wells Fargo said. “He is a valued customer and we hope to resolve this matter with him. We take all allegations of discrimination seriously.”

The lawsuit claimed Valery received this treatment because of “the color of Valery’s skin” and “the racism of Wells Fargo.”

“Had Mr. Valery been a white property developer visiting ANY Wells Fargo to deposit a check — much less the branch in his own backyard — we would simply not be here today,” according to court documents. “Mr. Valery’s experience is just one more in a striking series of shameful ‘banking while black’ incidents that have occurred at Wells Fargo branches in recent years, which constitute overwhelming evidence of systematic racism emanating from this banking institution.”

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.

“They took away my dignity when they did that — I wasn’t a person anymore,” Valery told The Baltimore Sun. “The questions I got were undignified. The treatment was undignified. That’s what institutional racism is.”

He added, “People of color haven’t finished fighting for their rights to be treated equally. For all the people who have gone through this at Wells Fargo and banks like Wells Fargo, it won’t stop until we take legal action.”

This is not the first lawsuit to accuse Wells Fargo in Baltimore of discriminatory practices. 

“The bank agreed to pay the city $7.5 million in 2012 to resolve a federal lawsuit alleging Wells Fargo’s lending practices led to a glut of foreclosed homes. The agreement was announced as Wells Fargo agreed to a $175 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve allegations that it discriminated against Black and Hispanic mortgage borrowers from 2004 through 2009,” the Business Journal reported.